Internet of Things: Concepts, Applications, and Challenges

Introduction

The term Internet of Things was first introduced by K. Ashton (1999). IoT technology itself isn't new. Previously components such as sensors that were expensive are now affordable, which has resulted in the popularity of “smart” products. Mohamed Abomhara and Geir M. Koien (2015) have stated that in the current state of technology, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) is the most popular application form of IoT. IoT enable things to be connected anytime, at anyplace, with anything and anyone ideally using any path/network and any service. In the IoT model, numerous objects that surround us will be on the network in one form or another. IoT is a new revolution of the Internet (Vermesan & Friess, 2013). The connectivity between IoT objects can increase reliability and efficiency due to improved access to information which results in better awareness about surrounding objects. Important prerequisites for the IoT are that the things/objects of interest can be uniquely identified and that their environment can be monitored with sensors. IoT objects make them-selves recognizable and can communicate information about them. They can access information that has been aggregated by other things, or they can be components of complex services.

Companies will make use of the IoT in order to efficiently monitor and control their internal business processes which includes the production, distribution, transportation, service, maintenance and recycling of their products. IoT will assist the companies to accurately capture the status of the entire enterprise and processes. To accomplish this goal, physical objects/things of the enterprises have to provide some “smart” functionality. Leonardo W. F. Chaves and Zoltán Nochta (2010) have grouped the smart functionalities provided by smart objects into five classes which are: information storage, information collection, communication, information processing and performance of actions. A given smart object may provide any meaningful subset of the above functionalities depending on specific requirements, available technologies and affordable costs. The things connected to the Internet need to provide value. Similarly, the smart things that are part of IoT need to provide a valuable service at a cost that enables adoption. The creation of value comes from all the components (devices, connectivity, applications) in IoT (Berthelsen, 2016). IoT objects/things are digitally inflated with one of the following:

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  Sensors (to sense temperature, light, motion, etc.),

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  Actuators (like displays, sound, motors, etc.),

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  Computation (to run programs and logic),

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  Communication interfaces (wired or wireless).

IoT consists of large scale information systems having application servers, resource planning systems, database management systems etc. The information systems in IoT receive data from the network of devices. IoT results in the generation of tremendous amounts of data which has to be stored processed and presented in a consistent, efficient, and easily understandable form (Gubbi, Buyya, Marusic et al., 2013). IoT requires three different types of software: backend server and database applications, firmware embedded in devices and mobile apps to interact with and control devices (Anders Wallgren, 2016).

According to business enterprises, there are three components of any IoT service: the edge, the platform and the user (Nicole Laskowski 2016):